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Times Data Team shortlisted in the international Data Journalism Awards

One of my final duties as Data Journalism Editor at The Times & The Sunday Times was to submit the team’s work over the last year for consideration by the jury of the Data Journalism Awards, which recognises outstanding work in the field worldwide.

I’m delighted to report that we’ve made the shortlist in the category of best team in a large newsroom.

Among the other shortlisted teams are the BBC, Bloomberg, FiveThirtyEight, the Guardian and the New York Times. The winner will be announced on 31 May.

Here is our award nomination.

The Data Team is a unit of programmer-journalists embedded in the newsrooms of The Times and The Sunday Times, the UK’s newspapers of record. The team works with colleagues across all subjects to deliver groundbreaking data-driven exclusives. Every story must meet exacting editorial standards in order to make it into the print and digital editions of these daily titles.

Data journalism should not leave the reader asking ‘so what?’. The work of the Data Team is to combine rigorous analysis with insight and context, in order to deliver news that matters to our sophisticated audience.

The Times’ investigation into the conduct of Oxfam staff in Haiti reverberated around the world. The Data Team was centrally involved in the research for two of the articles that made up the series.

At the core of the story is 11 months of old-fashioned reporting graft. But a partnership between data journalist Leila Haddou and the Times’ Chief Reporter saw data-driven OSINT techniques used to track down the charity worker at the centre of the scandal.

Following on from its revelations of widespread doping in athletics, The Sunday Times was given data from a new whistleblower, this time relating to the world of winter sports.

In the past, journalists used leaked documents, photographs and recordings to expose wrongdoing. The Data Team analysed skiers’ blood test results to reveal the extent of cheating. They don’t teach how to analyse leaked blood values in journalism school, so the Data Team and Insight worked with experts to develop a methodology.

Britain’s National Health Service is increasingly fragmented, with patients under different regional health boards receiving different treatment. The Data Team performed a geospatial analysis that brought the problem home. This novel approach allowed reporters to home in on areas illustrating the regional divide. The result is a brilliant example of data enriching traditional reporting.

More homes are being built in Britain – but they’re shrinking. Innovative use of environmental data shed light on the housing crisis.

EU law requires environmental performance data to be published for all homes for sale or rent. These include floor area, which the Data Team used for the first time to show the rise of the ‘rabbit hutch flats’ phenomenon.

The gender pay gap is a hot topic, and politicians from all parties in the UK are weighing in. The Data Team scraped the register of parliamentarians’ interests to see whether they had their own house in order.

Many FTSE 100 companies say they do not spend money for political ends. The Data Team wrote a scraper to trawl the Parliament website, producing an exclusive dataset showing payments from corporations to groups of MPs. The team also analysed the EU lobbying register.

The parliament of Northern Ireland has been on hiatus for a year, after a power-sharing agreement between Nationalist and Unionist parties broke down. But the assembly members managed to put their differences aside for 46 minutes in order to claim their salaries.